What is Zapier's competition and how do verticalized versions impact the no-code industry?

Guest: Two things come to mind. One is that Zapier here appears in some ways limited because of the trigger action paradigm. I think there's a lot more complex, interesting, hard problems to solve that aren't just trigger and action.

There’s trigger processing, for example, like “make a bunch of decisions and then go do something.” And Zapier can't do that. Whether the processing is like machine learning or data transformation. So you see a lot of new entrants taking that on, like Parabola is like a good example of that. Then there's even up and comers like this company Levity AI, which is basically no code machine learning, so you can build your own categorization algorithm essentially. And they also have a workflow engine, so they actually integrate with Zapier too.

An example would be like, and this is a silly one, but say you integrate it with Gmail. So whenever you get an email with a photo attachment, it's going to look at the attachment and decide what kind of dog it is. And if it's a corgi, then it’s going to go put it in this Dropbox folder. If it’s a golden retriever, it’ll put it in this Dropbox folder. If it's another dog, it’s actually going to ping somebody and say something.

And you can set up these kind of branching steps and have multiple machine learning processes and algorithms along the way. Super powerful. And Zapier is never going to be the place where you do that work, nor is it going to be a place where the majority of people integrate with Levity AI, because presumably Levity AI will want to have their top integrations, the Dropbox and Gmail stuff, built native. They're going to build that all out of the box first party because they have such a strong incentive to lower the barrier to activation. So whatever the most common use cases are, they're going to build it all in house. Zapier becomes like the, “Oh, if we can't do it…. we have Zapier.”

It’s like the land of forgotten toys, And then I think it becomes a lot harder to enforce the premium pricing, which has already gone up a lot. think this is a challenge for them because other applications don’t make their money on automation. They make their money on whatever it might be—like per seat pricing. They drive upsell through automations, but it's not where they make their money. There’s no real reason for them to extract value from their customers off automations. Because from their perspective, the more automations they’re running, the stickier they are. Whereas the fact that Zapier charges per task means they can’t price on other things that might be more interesting or on other steps that might actually be creating way more value. They're constrained to that paradigm.